


It Was Always Supposed To Be Us In The End

by Still_beating_heart



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, But mentions of a lot of canon things, Including deaths, M/M, Past Kate Argent/Derek Hale, Past Lydia Martin/Stiles Stilinski, Past Stiles Stilinski/Malia Tate, Post Series, Post-Canon, Post-Nogitsune Stiles Stilinski, mentions of Kate Argent, read notes for warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:13:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25493665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Still_beating_heart/pseuds/Still_beating_heart
Summary: When he finally stops, he’s breathing hard, he’s sweating and his eyes are burning in the late afternoon summer’s sun tangled in his brown hair and licking his white skin, “it didn’t leave any scars,” he spits.  Angry, tired, weary, and alone, “all those things.  That I did.  That I caused.  And it didn’t leave any scars!”He’s a live-wire.  Anger hot and seething.  Frustration bowing itself around every box in his head.You see a pebble of red blood on his pink lips.Years later.  Years later.  Years of fighting and scratching to the surface.  Years of staying alive and keeping each other alive.  Years of it.  And the one thing.  The only thing that he’s put in a box.  Laid it in blood.  Wrapped it in pain.  Bowed it with the death he caused.And it never left any scars.  At least when there are scars there is a reminder.  A reminder that isn’t only trapped inside your head.You understand.  But you don’t tell him.  Instead, you watch his fists turning pale and white against his legs where he’s holding them steady.  The veins in his arms rising to the surface of his white skin.  The muscles clamped down tight, hardened, and years of untapped anger.
Relationships: Derek Hale & Stiles Stilinski, Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	It Was Always Supposed To Be Us In The End

**Author's Note:**

> This is kind of vague so I feel like the warnings don't need to be super in depth, but as fair warnings go: mentions of Derek/prostitute, mentions of Derek/Kate, mentions of Derek/Braedon, mentions of Stiles/Malia, mentions of Stiles/Lydia. This starts with some canon events, so there's canon deaths mentioned, Hale fire, Nogitsune. And it brings us through post-canon, so there's also mentions of a Stiles/Lydia break-up. It ends with Derek/Stiles. But it's not exactly an easy journey for not being very many words. There's suicidal thoughts. And hitting. And blood. And hopefully that's all. If I missed anything, I apologize. So I guess: Enter At Your Own Risk...

You visit the place with the turquoise curtains and the plum colored walls. You put half the cash on the bedside table now. You like the way his blood looks against the pale expanse of his flesh. Like a holly berry on a dusting of virgin snow. You like the noise he makes when your claw pierces his skin. And you watch it trail down the pure canvas of his back.

You make certain he looks _like_. But not the _same_.

You’d tear yourself apart if you were certain you’d die. 

You want sex like religion. Like walking through flames just to see the other side. Like stepping on hot coals just to feel something. Anything. 

You want sex like religion and you could write sonnets about his lips. 

You visit the place with the turquoise curtains and the plum colored walls. You pay him half upfront. And half when it’s over. When the blood is drying on his pale flesh and his wounds are stitching themselves back together and you imagine what it’d be like on _his_ skin. On _his_ flesh. On his _human_ flesh.

You want to do the things to him that she did to you. You want to leave him broken and gasping but crying for more. For more. More because it’s love. That’s what love _is_.

You have a box for every part of your life. The befores and afters. 

You have a box decorated with the scent of homemade meals, wrapped in the sound of laughter, and bowed with goodnight kisses. You have a box with the scent of family and home. You have a box that you keep inside all the other boxes of grief. You never dust it off anymore. You never let yourself.

You shove him against a wall just as an excuse to touch. To get close enough to scent. To get close enough to look at his lips. To watch his tongue dart out and wet them. You could write sonnets about his lips.

You visit the place with the turquoise curtains and plum colored walls. You pay him upfront. All of it. And you do the things that’ve been done to you. You leave him shocked and pained and undone. And you leave him more cash. 

It doesn’t fill the void.

You have a box for everything that’s been done to you. For everything that you’ve done. You have a box with sharp claws and blue-green skin. And you imagine watching yourself disembowel her.

You want sex like religion. With fire and brimstone and damnation. _He_ has claw marks on his back. You wonder how it’d look if they were yours.

Your anger is violent. Your anger is your anchor. Your anger is the only thing. And when you visit the place with the turquoise curtains and plum colored walls he feels your anger. But he doesn’t take it.

You want sex like religion.

So you try a new deity. She doesn’t fill your desire. It twists on your flesh and lingers like copper in your mouth. 

You watch him turn into someone he’s not. You watch him become a vessel for chaos. 

He starts stalking you in your dreams.

You want sex like religion. This deity has knowledge, an edge, and the delicacy of human. The marks on her neck to prove it. 

You want love like religion and he’s there. _He’s _there when you die. He’s the last thing you see. And you think you never did tell him about his lips.__

____

____

————————

Vengeance is your only religion. You no longer want anything else. You burn for it. You ache for it. And you open those boxes. The boxes that were wrapped in screams. Decorated with flames. And bowed with ashes. 

You chase. You stalk. You kill. Because they deserve it. For every death she caused, you cause two. Everything she took from you, you take from them.

————————

His hand is in hers. And they make a beautiful couple. They get the happy ending. The underdog wins the prize. If the prize is a pretty redhead with sharp wit and sharp nails.

You realize too late that your beliefs are faulted.

Your system is flawed.

Your ground is shaking.

Your anchor has washed out to sea. 

————————

Leaving has always been your answer before. But no matter where you go, they always find you, they always follow you, they always haunt your dreams.

So you visit the place they died. You watch the families that live there now. You notice the land. The way the land has changed. The way the forest has been destroyed. 

You put it all in a box. Decorate it with yearning. Wrap it in loss. And tie a bow made of pain around it. You put it in that space with all the other boxes. You let it get dusty. And moldy. You let it fester. 

————————

You visit the place with the turquoise curtains and plum colored walls. It’s a gift shop now.

You remember the way his blood pebbled against his pale flesh. You swallow regret. And hope he’s become the thing he always wanted to be. 

You remember why you chose him. Because he looked _like_. But not the _same_. 

Your phone buzzes in your pocket. You ignore it until it stops. You watch through the glass of the storefront. And you remember the way it sounded when you flopped your cash down on the dresser. 

For a moment you remember who you were back then. For a moment you remember who you were before then. You sort through your boxes until you find the one. The one that was a different life. The one that’s ripe with family and love. Your eyes fall upon a child in the store. Her hand tracing over the wooden engine of an antique train set. 

You watch as a hand, older, larger but still the same. Still pale. Long fingered. Bony. And delicate. Rises and lands on your shoulder. The reflection in the glass. The touch that lingers, tattooed there from when he lay dying on your claws. 

“Glaring at life means something totally different when there’s a kid on the other side of the glass, dude,” his voice floats down around you, twists in your throat and pierces your belly.

You shake his hand off and force your gaze away from the store. The building that used to have turquoise curtains. And plum colored walls. Red blood on white skin. 

Your breath shakes. Your boots make noise on the pavement and you wonder for the first time in your life how much louder that is to you than it is to them. 

“Whatcha doin’?” he has to walk quickly to keep up with you, but his legs are long and his clumsiness has faded with age.

“I don’t know,” you spit it out like it leaves a sour taste on your tongue. You knew what you were doing. A moment ago. You knew what you plan was. Like. But not the same. Your mouth tastes of bile. You open a box in your mind. The one wrapped in turquoise with a plum colored bow. The one twisted with red blood and white skin. 

“You, uh,” his hand lands on your arm again, giving you a tug back this time, back away from the curb where you were maybe about to walk out in front of a car. Not that it’d hurt you. You’d do it. If you knew it could hurt you, “want to get a cup of coffee or something?”

Shaking his hand off your arm, watching the truck drive past you. Your body stops. It stops moving. Like it’s finally, just now caught up to all the things you’ve stored away. You’ve wrapped and bowed and kept nice and neat in your head for so long. It’s a drop of red blood on white skin dotted by beauty marks. 

“Or, um, go somewhere to glare at inanimate objects?”

You’d scream. If you knew anyone was listening.

You’d tear yourself apart if you knew you’d die. 

Your hand wants to reach, wants to touch, wants to pull, wants to try all the old tricks. Your hand wants to fist in his collar and drag him close to you. Your hand wants to keep him there as you stare at his lips. As you watch his tongue dart out and wet them. As you watch him swallow hard, the column of his throat working quickly under his fear. But he’s not afraid of you anymore.

Maybe he should be. Maybe she was right all along. Maybe you are a monster. 

“Or we can stand here and you can glare at me,” his lips quirk up into an uncertain smile, his heart thuds hard against his chest, and your hands shove into your pockets. Your claws dig into the hard calloused flesh of your palm. Your palms and the soles of your feet. Where you are more animal than man. 

———————

“See,” he sighs, leaning his hands back on the flat rock he’s taken residence atop, “it’s easier to glare at things that don’t give you weird looks when they catch you glaring at them,” his river stone eyes calmly scan nature around you. 

You breathe. The scents of nature. Mixed with the scent of him. 

You sort through the boxes in your mind. The one where you’ve kept him. For ages it seems. The one that’s the last place, the only box that was put there on accident. The one that was never wrapped in betrayal. Papered in loss. Or bowed in fear. 

———————

“I don’t think she ever loved me,” he tells you one day.

The river is wide. The water is pure. The current is strong. You’d throw yourself in if you thought it would take you away. Carry you away into the depth of somewhere else. Somewhere different. Somewhere they’d never find you. Somewhere they’d stop whispering in your ears, telling you that it’s your fault. That it’s always been your fault. 

“No?” you hear yourself respond after a breath. Or two. Or maybe an eternity.

“No,” you can feel his eyes on you but you can’t return the favor, “I think I was just too stubborn and she finally got tired of dodging me,” in your peripheral you see his smile twist with something you’re not willing to put a word on. You know the feeling. You’re not sure anyone has ever loved you. But you don’t tell him that. 

You know the feeling. And it’s right there, twisting around all those boxes, wrapping itself through them like a snake of loneliness. The one box, the only one that was filled with love. But it was your fault.

“At least she gave me back the ring,” his voice is different, his heart is a heavy thud, “and we’ll stay friends. Probably.”

You feel yourself nod. 

———————

You watch the pebble as it sinks beneath the surface. The reflections of sun off the moving water making the pebble appear as though it’s fluttering instead of just sinking. 

The next one hits with more behind it. 

Harder on the next. 

He’s silent. But there are tears in his eyes. He’s bitting his lips. The lips you never did write sonnets about. You wonder when you thought you’d find religion. You’d find religion in those lips. You wonder where that went.

You listen. To each rock, slipping under the surface. Splashing, droplets disturbing the flat body of water. Ripples that reach all the way to shore. 

Ripples that reach so far. So far that you can never outrun them.

When he finally stops, he’s breathing hard, he’s sweating and his eyes are burning in the late afternoon summer’s sun tangled in his brown hair and licking his white skin, “it didn’t leave any scars,” he spits. Angry, tired, weary, and alone, “all those things. That I did. That I caused. And it didn’t leave any scars!”

He’s a live-wire. Anger hot and seething. Frustration bowing itself around every box in his head. 

You see a pebble of red blood on his pink lips. 

Years later. Years later. Years of fighting and scratching to the surface. Years of staying alive and keeping each other alive. Years of it. And the one thing. The only thing that he’s put in a box. Laid it in blood. Wrapped it in pain. Bowed it with the death he caused. 

And it never left any scars. At least when there are scars there is a reminder. A reminder that isn’t only trapped inside your head. 

You understand. But you don’t tell him. Instead, you watch his fists turning pale and white against his legs where he’s holding them steady. The veins in his arms rising to the surface of his white skin. The muscles clamped down tight, hardened, and years of untapped anger. 

You understand, “hit me,” your voice is stronger than your mind. 

“What?” his lips tremble. His eyes darkened, flushed cheeks, and that beed of blood on his lip. 

“Hit me,” you growl it this time. And make a move towards him. With your fists clenched at your sides. With your shoulders low. With a wall of your body that he’ll have to push back. He has to push back. Or risk losing his ground and falling in the lake below.

“No,” you hear him utter his defiance but your legs don’t stop. 

“Hit me!”

He does. He hits you. And it opens the flood gate. His fists angry. Years of pent up, bottled up, tamped down. Years of raw, flayed wounds that lived right there on his surface but no one could see them. No one could heal them. No one could touch them. No one could run a gentle finger over them and ask how. Ask when. Ask where. 

He hits you. You let him tear you apart. You feel every blow. Every rivulet of blood. Every cracking of bone. Every piercing of skin. You feel it rushing through you and mingling in that river of opened boxes. Boxes lying broken and scattered. A river of red inside your veins. The debris of your life washing itself away with his pain. His breath is coming out raspy, panted, every word that slips off his tongue. Every word a name. Every word the lost. Every word the buried. Every word the broken. Every word the fear.

Fear of what’s next. Of what you’ll have to face next. Fear of when it’ll all be over. Fear of when it’ll begin again. Fear of all the broken pieces left behind. The broken pieces you want to leave on the ground. You want to leave them on the ground.

When he’s finally spent. When metal is in your mouth. And blood is sliding down your face. When cracked ribs are slowly rebuilding. When open wounds are sewing themselves back together. 

There are tears streaming down his cheeks. Sliding into the corners of his mouth along with the sweat that’s glistening on the surface of him.

He watches you. Waiting for your reaction. Waiting for you to hit him back. Maybe. Or toss him in the river. Along with all your broken boxes floating away on the current.

You spit. Leaving a piece of tooth on the ground at his foot.

He takes a startled step back. Watches you heave a breath through bruised ribs and pain you’ve rolled between you. 

He bites his lip, opens his mouth and your hand darts out from your side. His mouth hangs open, but no words exit. You pull him close, close enough that your noses brush against one another. Your nose with drying blood in it. You’re close enough to smell the tears that are drying on his cheeks. Close enough to smell the tang of metal from where he bit his lip. Close enough to feel the vibrations exiting his body. The vibrations of letting go.

Letting go. Of years of anger. And regret. And pain.

Letting go.

You do that now. Releasing your hold on his shirt. Releasing your hold on him. Releasing the breath you were holding. Feeling the knot in your stomach release. The one that’s been tied so tight for so many years of longing. 

You take a step back. Nod at him. And you turn. 

In your mind, you’re already picking up all those broken boxes, you’re sorting through the shattered pieces. Putting them back together. And storing them away. Storing them away under the hissed whispers, and tainted truths. Your fault. All your fault.

“No, fuck that,” you hear him mutter, grabbing you by the shoulders to spin you around. His mouth is on yours before you can finish gathering your broken pieces.

His mouth is on yours. Warm and searching. Desperate for something. Anything. The same things you’ve been desperate for. 

Your breath catches, your heart throbs. His hand slides across the bruises he put on your jaw. The ones you told him to put there. The ones that destroyed all those boxes. Wrapped in burning paper. Ribboned with charred bows. And echoing with truths and lies. 

You hear yourself whimper against his lips. Wanting to tell him that you’re not worth it. You’ll never be worth it. Any of it.

But he pulls away, just far enough to catch your gaze. To keep your gaze. A smile grasps the corners of his lips. Stained now with your blood. And his blood. Turned into shades of pink with his salty tears that mingle there now. 

He smiles. He smiles broad and childlike. His hand slides across your cheek, slips into your hair, lingers at the back of your head. Fingers that are always busy, always moving, always keeping tap and breaking the silence that would otherwise stretch for eternity as he leans in again. This time slow. Testing. Tasting. Lingering. Sweet and steady. Unguarded. Safe. Leisurely. Untainted by the constraints of time. Untwisted with the past. Untied with the future.

Only here. Only now. And you’re certain you could write sonnets about _those lips_. 

———————

When his head is thrown back, his legs around your hips and his breath panted. When you watch his swallow move his Adam’s Apple. When you listen to his heart beating a sated and exhausted rhythm. When you see him smile up at you from the pillow that’s cradling his head. You realize. You realize that you don’t want sex like religion. You want _love_ like religion. And you’re certain, you’re certain you’ve found it.

“It was always supposed to be us,” he smiles, sliding a hand through your sweat slicked hair, “in the end.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks friends. Take care of yourselves and validate me with kudos before you go :)


End file.
